I am glad I found this thread as I am in the same boat as
@Octopuss in that I was looking at used SAS drives on Ebay to use as a pool.
@Octopuss, which seller was willing to provide SMART info to you prior to purchase? I have asked 7 different SAS drive sellers and they all responded in the negative.
Lots of interesting info related to block size etc that I might have to go over as well since the sellers I found that sell a mix of 512 and 520 block size randomly. As long as the formatting can be changed to 512 then it should be ok to run together, correct?
The sellers that I have been looking at, for 3TB sizes, have the HGST HUS723030ALS640 & Seagate ST3000NM0023 drives. Should either of those model be of concern?
I am not looking for speed like the OP. The reason I was looking at used SAS drives was
- I wanted to create a ZFS pool on proxmox as a backup to my main TrueNAS pool
- I was planning on a 6 drive RAIDZ2 pool and keep 1 HDD as cold spare -- so I would be buying a total of 7 drives.
- at $15-$25 a pop, they are significantly cheaper than new SATA drives which cost around $70 for WD Red Plus 3TB and $105 for Seagate Ironwolf 3TB
@Octopuss what's your latest report in terms of drive stability/reliability for the used SAS drives that you purchased?